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June 19, 2026 — 5:00am
There’s a clear reason Pauline Hanson is picking up support among voters - but no evidence she knows how to fix things.
Some of the issues she raises reflect real concerns that Australians have – as suggested by polling which shows primary vote support for One Nation has overtaken that of Labor and the Coalition.
Polling, of course, is not always an accurate reflection of what people think or how they will vote. But even if it is, I’m not convinced most Australians are backing One Nation because they agree with the party’s more extreme ideas.
More likely, it’s a reflection of their dissatisfaction with stagnating living standards (largely misattributed to things such as immigration and government spending on things they can’t see an immediate, tangible benefit from).
There’s probably also an underappreciated “bandwagon” effect. As a growing group of Australians have flocked to express support for Pauline Hanson, at least some people have probably (not always consciously) found themselves drifting in the same direction.
Either way, it’s likely that the rising support for One Nation has a fair bit to do with our stagnating living standards: prices and interest rates have crept back up while wages have failed to fully keep up, and growth in productivity – our ability to do things better, faster or using fewer resources – has been painfully slow.
The Productivity Commission’s deputy chair Alex Robson, for example, said in the commission’s latest quarterly bulletin, for example, that Australia’s labour productivity growth is going “from bad to worse”. We’re working harder and longer, he said, but not working smarter.
Now don’t take that to heart: it’s not that we’re working “stupidly”. In fact, although many of us probably feel like we could work smarter or more efficiently some days, a lot of the potential productivity gains come from things which are not directly in our control.
A big driver of productivity is the technology and equipment we have to do our jobs more easily: a coffee machine for a cafe worker, a laptop for an office worker or a cement mixer for a builder. Some of the monumental technological developments throughout history have included the steam engine (which helped us transport things, and ourselves, more quickly) and the internet (which helped us find and share information swiftly).
But the thing is, these things don’t just appear instantly. New technologies often take a lot of money and time to develop and build so we can reap the productivity benefits. That’s why you often hear about the importance of encouraging more investment by businesses in Australia: we need firms to spend money on developing and using technology that will make it easier for us to work – or improve the goods and services we’re producing.
The government is also spending money on things aimed at boosting our productivity, such as improving our electricity system. As Robson points out, a productive economy needs reliable and affordable energy. Without that, some of us would really struggle to do our work at all.
Unlike AI, which was built on a lot of private investment most of us didn’t pay much attention to until the sudden boom in technologies such as ChatGPT, things such as improved electricity network quality have been slow to come about, and lower emissions have been hard to see with our own eyes.
Improvements like these have also not been picked up in conventional measures of productivity, because their effects are hard to pinpoint. And as business groups have made clear, without productivity growth, we don’t deserve higher wages.
Similarly, while the pressure put on housing affordability through increased demand (disproportionately blamed on immigrants) and inadequate supply are keenly felt, it’s harder to measure and realise the benefits we’ve had from immigration: from more vibrant communities and cuisine to increased productivity as we learn new ways to do things.
The stagnation in our living standards has been real, but we risk misdiagnosing the problem if we listen to people like Pauline Hanson.
Not only does she throw around statistics with no verifiable source, but she calls global warming a “hoax” that has led to higher energy costs and has declared she would scrap plans for any new wind turbines.
Yes, moving to renewable energy has not been cheap. The government – and private companies – have spent billions of dollars on renewable energy and clean technology. And yes, that comes at the expense of other things people might care about.
But ignoring climate change will not bring down power bills. It will actually come at a huge cost to some of the people she cares about most, including Australian farmers who are already facing huge costs from intensifying weather such as droughts and floods.
It’s understandable that many Australians feel they’re doing it tough and are taking it out on the major parties. They certainly haven’t been perfect.
But it’s more difficult to explain to some voters the importance of investing in the renewable transition (something aimed at averting disaster and putting us in a better position in the future), for example, than to tell them that the hardship they’re facing now with energy bills could be dealt with immediately by sticking with fossil fuels.
Politicians often benefit more, politically, from making out like they’re “saving” us from an immediate crisis than setting us up on a path aimed at preventing something bad from happening, or investing in something that will make our lives better down the line.
Part of the reason our productivity growth has been stagnating is that sectors such as electricity are undergoing a massive transformation.
As the Productivity Commission’s latest bulletin explains, a bunch of improvements are under way including replacing ageing infrastructure, improving the reliability of electricity production and investing in lower emission technology.
That’s all great for improving our ability to meet future demand for electricity and reducing our emissions, but it’s something that has dampened our measured productivity in the short term.
Why? Because there’s a delay between when new energy assets such as wind farms or transmission lines are built and when they are used at full capacity (which is when we experience the full benefits). Some benefits such as lower emissions also aren’t really picked up in how we measure productivity.
The commission estimates than in 2023-24, Australia spent more than $20 billion constructing infrastructure for generating, transmitting and distributing electricity – and more than $113 billion over the past decade.
Renewable energy comes at a big upfront cost, but once the infrastructure is up and running, there are no fuel costs and fewer worker costs than burning fossil fuels such as coal. In fact, energy economists Paul Simshauser and Joel Gilmore estimate that if investment in the National Electricity Market had been restricted to coal and gas-fired generation over the past two decades, wholesale electricity prices would have been higher today.
Of course, governments should still be on the hook to continue the energy transformation as productively as possible, making sure investment flows to the least-cost energy systems and most efficient ways of reducing emissions. But One Nation clearly has no interest in this.
When people feel squeezed, it can be appealing to jump on the bandwagon of someone promising quick and easy “solutions”. But while this short-sightedness can pay off for some politicians, believing them is a surefire way to keep us “swamped” by policies which drag down our living standards.
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